Hyper-V | When Software Attacks!

Things to remember when building virtual machines for a lab manager environment

As you will have read on both mine and Richard’s blogs, we have recently upgraded our Lab environment and it wasn’t the smoothest of processes.

However, as always it has been a learning experience and this post is all about building VM environments that can be sucked into Lab and turned into a Lab environment that can be pushed out multiple times.

Note: This article is all about virtual machines running on Windows Server 2012 that may have been built on Windows 8 and are managed by SCVMM 2012 SP1 and Lab Manager/TFS 2012 CU1. Whilst the things I have found in terms of prepping VMs for Lab Manager are likely to be common to older versions, your mileage may vary.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Notes from the field on our SCVMM/Lab Manager environment upgrade

Richard has posted a group effort article on his blog about our System Center 2008 R2/Lab Manager upgrade to System Center 2012 SP1/Lab Manager. All did not go swimmingly…

I have more helpful notes that I am writing up myself and will post over the next few days around the steps to fix virtual machines that are part of an environment and tips on building complex multi-machine rigs for lab manager.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, March 4, 2013

A Virtual Ice Cream Sandwich: Android 4 x86 in a Hyper-V VM

More and more of our projects include a stipulation from the client that any web sites must work on the tablet devices of senior management. Up until recently that was exclusively iPads, but we are now seeing more Android devices out there. I wanted to find a straightforward way for us to test on such devices, preferably without needing to build up a collection of expensive physical kit.

I read with interest Ben Armstrong’s post about running Android 2.2 (Froyo) in a VM using a build from the Android x86 project. I started my journey by replicating his steps, so I won’t document any of that here, other than to note that the generic x86 build you need is now a deprecated one, so I had to hunt a little to find what I needed.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, June 18, 2012

IT Camp Leeds Roundup

Yesterday was great fun and I was really pleased to see so many Black Marble event regulars at the IT Camp. It was great to hear so many requests for more events like it in Leeds. We’re all keen to run more, but we need people to attend and give us feedback in order to be able to do that.

I hope those of you who were there took away useful knowledge from the event. Andy and Simon were very keen that it should not be a day of PowerPoint and canned demos and we certainly delivered that. Did we have technical issues that meant we had to change plans on the fly? Sure! Certainly nobody we spoke to seemed to mind. All of us from Black Marble thought the concept for the day – one of interaction, audience participation and trying to build systems on the fly – should be fun and we thought it was.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Wednesday, February 29, 2012

Server Core, Hyper-V and VLANs: An Odyssey

A sensible plan

This is a torrid tale of frustration and annoyance, tempered by the fun of digging through system commands and registry entries to try and get things working.

We’ve been restructuring our network at Black Marble. The old single subnet was creaking and we were short of addresses so we decided to subnet with network subnets for physical, virtual internal and virtual development servers, desktops, wifi etc. We don’t have a huge amount of network equipment, and we needed to put virtual servers hosted on hyper-v on separate networks so we decided to use VLANs.

Posted by Rik Hepworth on Monday, December 6, 2010

When Software Attacks!